152 ten seen the Pathé Passion Play run at such enormous speed that the characters were jumping around the screen like a lot of school boys. Such an exhibition was dis- gusting to the audience and offensive to those of deeply religious inclination and who revere those characters. Even after the electric motor eased the physical labor of the projectionist, si- lent film studios often furnished cue sheets along with their prints, which itemized the changes in speed that, like tempo markings on a piano score, were an important part of the experience of films such as "The Birth of a Nation." One of the reasons silent movies can seem so ridiculous now (in addition to the fact that some of them are ridiculous, of course) is that they are frequently pre- sented at the fixed, twenty-four-frames- per-second rate adopted for equipment in the late 1920s, in conjunction with the optical soundtrack (the ear can't tolerate changes in speed the way the eye can), rather than at variable rates more in the vicinity of sixteen frames a second, as was conventional until then. But despite these momentous changes- the stabilization of film speed; sound; Technicolor; the replacement of nitrate- based film with fixe-retardant acetate; xe- non bulbs; platterization-the really re- markable thing about the evolution of the projector over the past century is how similar in motive essentials a 1994 Simplex machine is to the original Armat!Le Prince design. Film still moves on sprockets with sixteen teeth, and the crucial "intermittent" sprocket-the one that actually stops and starts the film- is still powered, as it was at Koster & Bial's Music Hall, by a lovely piece of precision machinery called the Geneva movement, which was fixst developed by Swiss watchmakers to prevent springs fÌom being overwound. The Geneva move- ment has two main pieces: a Maltese cross (or star, or starwheel) and a more pedestrian cam, both of which splash around half-submerged in oil. The pin on the steadily turrung cam slips into the slot in the Maltese cross and forces it to rotate a quarter of a turn and then stop dead, immobilized by the cam's circular edge. When the star is stopped, a single immobile image floods the theatre screen for a few hundredths of a second; when it turns, the film advances under cover of shuttered darkness. The moviegoer's brain, hoodwinked by this succession of still lives, obligingly infers motion. "You know what a Maltese cross is";)" an itinerant projector-repairman with questionable toilet habits asks an in- competent projectionist near the end of Wim Wenders' mammoth ftlm-fteuve, "Kings of the Road." The projectionist takes a guess: Some kind of drink? The repairman shakes his head sadly and tries to explain it to him. 'Without this little thing, there'd be no film industry!" he says. The projectionist is unimpressed, and (because "Kings of the Road" is a semi-comprehensible art movie) he ca- sually inhales the flame from a cigarette lighter to close out the scene. But the workings of the true star system, though they may take a moment to grasp (Fig. 2), repay meditation: Seldom has a mecha- nism so simple, so unexpectedly heraldic, persisted without modification at the center of a ruthless business that has oth- erwise undergone continuous technical, artistic, and financial upheavals. The Simplex projector, which many hold to be the finest, is built in Omaha by a company called Ballantyne, which also makes theatrical spotlights and high-tech chicken cookers. The Maltese cross within the Simplex projector, how- ever, is manufactured in Glendale Heights, Illinois, the work of a privately held company called La V ezzi Precision Incorporated, run by fifty-one-year-old AI La Vezzi. AI La Vezzi' s grandfather, Edward La Vezzi, got his start, during the First World War, by milling the worn teeth off projector sprockets and sweating new brass ones on. N ow, in a sort of benevolent monopoly, La- Vezzi's company makes sprockets and intermittent movements for Simplex, Century, and Ballantyne projectors (all three brands are co-owned, and based in Omaha), and also for several companies in Europe and Asia, and for Christie, In- corporated projectors made in Cypress, California. For Christie, La Vezzi devel- oped a sealed, belt-driven intermittent movement, alluringly called the Ultra- mittent, that never needs oiling. La Vezzi Precision is also responsible for the leg- endary VKF sprocket-the Very Kind to Film sprocket, that is-whose teeth are smoothed in meaningful ways by computer-controlled four-axis machin- ing centers. The manufacture of the VKF sprocket is a "no-brainer," how- ever, according to Mr. La V ezzi, com- pared to making the Maltese cross, where serious flaws are measured in mil- lionths of an inch. "The slot of a star has to be perfect," he says, pronouncIng "perfect" with inspiring plosiveness. Will there always be intermittent sprockets, and the projectors they serve, at work in the world? Will later genera- tions of movie watchers know how similar a projector sounds to an idling VW Beede? Will they, when viewing that superb early scene in Charlie Chaplin's "Mod- ern Times," realize that, though Chaplin is ostensibly dragged down into the bow- els of a huge "Electro Steel Corp." ma- chine, he is really miming a piece of flex- ible film and threading himself through the sprockets of a movie projector? I've watched quite a few projector-movies re- cently (including one that I haven't been able to splice in anywhere here, called "The Smallest Show on Earth," in which Peter Sellers plays an old projectionist who disrupts a Western when he gets drunk in the booth), but I watched ev- ery one of them on videotape. I paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, played, and paused again so much in studying the last scene of "Desperately Seeking Susan," for instance (Aidan C29inn kisses Rosanna Arquette against a Simplex projector playing a sci-fi movie about mutant attackers-Rosanna's back arrests the winged chariot of the movie reel and the film frame melts on the screen), that the black plastic housing of the rented video gave off an unusually strong and pleas- ing smell of miniature VCR servomotors and hot printed-circuit boards when I at last, having subjected the lovers' frame- melting embrace to a level of scrutiny it was never meant to bear, ejected it. But that single 35-mm. rectangle of color film contains, it is estimated, the equivalent of forty megabytes of digi- tal information: forty megabytes, the contents of an entire small hard disk, in every frame of a movie. Even if one as- sumes all sorts of clever data compres- sion, it is difficult to imagine digital stor- age systems matching the Van Eyckian resolution of the chemical grains on a strip of 35- or 70-mm. mOVle film any- time soon. Projectors, and the durably whirling Maltese crosses inside them, may still be around when, in another thirty years, a third, magnificently re- imagined "Blob" oozes into the projec- tion area of the local eight-plex and be- gins stirring up trouble. And by then, perhaps, horror-film makers will be brave enough to show us a few platters. .